What does that mean? That means your professional team can accomplish 10x more work, do it with 10x more quality, 10x faster, or with 10x less resources. Your family can be 10x happier. Your school can be 10x more effective at helping people learn. Your community group can be 10x better at making life better for the people it serves. Even you yourself can be 10x more effective at getting what you want.

In other words, you can be great. Your team can be great.

Greatness

Can you say these things about your teams?

My projects are completed effortlessly on schedule and in budget every time.

Every team I’ve ever been on has shared a vision.

In meetings, we only ever do what will get results.

No one blames “management," or anyone else, if they don’t get what they want.

Everybody shares their best ideas right away.

Ideas are immediately unanimously approved, improved, or rejected by the team.

Action on approved ideas begins immediately.

Conflict is always resolved swiftly and productively.

The Core Protocols are one way to make teams that have these characteristics.

Target Audience

Slides

Links

The slides are a sample, from the presentation at Agile Boston earlier this year. A video of this talk is coming soon...

Richard, Julia, and David have presented versions of this talk individually and together at Agile Boston, Busininess Agility Boston, and Scrum Gathering 2015 Open Space, and they are booked to share it at the Toronto Agile conference (the closing keynote), a webinar with cPrime, TechStars Boston, CTO School Boston, Agile Delaware, Agile Philly, Agile NYC, and Richard's class at Harvard University Extension School.

Richard Cheng - Situational Retrospectives – One size does not fit all

schedule 2 years ago

45 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Situation A: Your team is great. You’ve met all your sprint goals and your Product Owner is pleased with the results to date. Yeah!

Situation B: Your team sucked. Zero story points completed last sprint. Team members are complaining and blaming each other for the failures.

These two situations demand two very different retrospectives. The right retrospective can make a good team great and turn a bad situation into a learning opportunity. A bad retrospective can set a team back and create a non-safe working environment.

In this session, attendees will explorer retrospectives techniques and examine the pros and cons of the techniques. The workshop will then explore scenarios and examine how to effectively run retrospectives across a variety of scenarios.

Coming out of this sessions, attendees will have an understanding of applying the right retrospectives based on the state and needs of the team and projects.

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Are you struggling to implement Agile at your company? What could be better than to learn from someone who has done it wrong over and over! We want to share our experiences pioneering Agile at a FinTech company. After multiple attempts and through sheer stubbornness, we were we able to get it right and improve our release pace by 650% annually. We will walk through where we went wrong, what we did right, and why we now understand that Agile cannot be successful without profound collaboration, Continuous Delivery, a DevOps culture and a desire to continuously improve.

Ken Furlong - How to Organize Multi-Team Programs

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Why does the Agile community encourage cross-functional teams? So many large organizations have naturally organized into system-specific teams. This is a very common and logical approach. At scale, though, it creates serious impediments to organizational agility and getting things done. We'll discuss the roots of that phenomenon, one of our key interests in cross-functional teams, patterns for enabling such a team structure, some failure modes, and how to prevent them. Please join us!

Richard Cheng - Let's all agree to agree - The importance of a Team Charter

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

We've all see Project Charters. Project Charters usually state the vision, mission, roadmaps, and is hand top down to the teams. However, how many of us have Team Charters in place. Team Charters are one of the most powerful tools a team has when it comes to being able to work effectively together.

This workshop explores the dynamics of creating a team charter, the definition of ready, and the definition of done and how all this works together to create software that is ready for review, to potentially shippable, to released into production.

Brian Sjoberg - Moving at the Speed of Molasses ... This Might Have Something to do with It!

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Demonstration

Beginner

Are you struggling with delivering a potentially releasable working product every iteration? Ever wonder what one of biggest reasons we have difficulty getting things done at the individual, team and organizational level are? Do you keep doing something even though you know it reduces your productivity and lowers quality? We are going to run an exercise that highlights one of the major culprits that you have all experienced and continue to experience. The exercise will likely ignite a fire that will help you, your team and your organization to become more productive and improve product quality. We will discuss ways to improve this at the individual, team and organization levels.

Knowing this will help anyone to understand the consequences of not prioritizing and increase their desire to. This will lead to producing faster, higher quality products that should lead to delighted customers.

Mathias Eifert - Using Lean Thinking to Increase the Value of Agile

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

“Agile doesn’t have a brain.” This quote from Bill Scott, ‎VP, Business Engineering and Product Development at PayPal, is provocative for sure, but it highlights the perception that in most organizations Agile is primarily applied as a downstream engineering approach. As such, it isn’t inherently concerned with optimizing product design and user experience, the biggest drivers of customer satisfaction. The feedback cycles that form the basis of Scrum provide verification and validation of stakeholder needs only as they are expressed in the backlog’s user stories. Even if a sufficiently empowered and accessible Product Owner is available, agile methods offer little guidance on how to translate organizational goals and customer needs into the backlog’s content and relative priorities in the first place. As a result, the danger persists that agile teams end up very efficiently building products that implement an incomplete and subjective perception of the wants and needs of both the organization and its customers.

In this session, we will explore how Lean thinking expands the “inspect and adapt” loops of agile development and helps systematically determine which features and design choices really provide the greatest organizational value. After a brief introduction to Lean concepts, we will discuss how Lean approaches product development as a series of hypotheses about customers’ behavior and value perception and builds on Agile’s rapid iterative delivery of working software to test these assumptions. Finally, we will examine ways to derive testable assumptions from organizational goals, such as the Lean UX Hypothesis Statement template and Gojko Adzic’s Impact Mapping.

toddcharron - Following Your Fear: How to do the things you've always wanted to do

schedule 2 years ago

45 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

What stops you from doing the things you’ve always wanted to do? What stops teams from being truly great? What hinders most Agile transformations?

Fear.

That feeling in your gut when deep down you know what you need to do, but you're not sure if you can do it.

Check out any of the “x things most successful people do” posts online. Every single one of them will mention fear. Why? Because fear can either energize you to success or paralyze you into inaction.

I’ll show you how to move from paralysis to action and how you can apply these techniques to yourself and to your Agile teams. How you, as a coach, can create safe environments so that your teams can be fearless.

In addition, we'll work hands on with the Fear Follower Canvas to help you move those things you want to do from the someday pile to done!

Dave Rooney - Emergent Design with Test-Driven Development

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

This workshop shows how Test-Driven Development (TDD) is used to enable emergent design. Using a simple but representative example in Java, the presenter will demonstrate how a low-level design naturally emerges when using the TDD cycle of test/code/refactor. The audience will be involved by suggesting the next steps and also by pairing with the presenter.

Note that the goal of the session isn't necessarily to have a complete working example at the end, but to illustrate the process of low-level design through TDD.

Fadi Stephan - Tips for Effective Product Backlog Refinement

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Are your Sprint planning meetings taking longer and longer each Sprint. Do you find yourself discussing new stories that the team is seeing for the very first time? Are some of the stories vague, complex, or very large? Is the priority unclear? These are all symptoms of ineffective Product Backlog Refinement which results in painful Sprint planning meetings. Team Product Backlog Refinement is an important activity that is frequently overlooked. The team is usually focused on delivering features for the current Sprint and devotes little time to work with the Product owner to prepare for the upcoming Sprints. Come to this session to understand the importance of Product Backlog Refinement, the different types of activities that are needed, when to perform each type, who should attend and how to make the most of everyone's time. Understand the importance of having a Definition of Ready, learn how to do progressive elaboration on user stories and how to expand on your acceptance criteria. Leave with tips and technique for conducting effective Product Backlog Refinement before your very next Sprint planning meeting.